[00:00:00] Dr. Carol Reynolds: Only in the last 50, 60 years, did we lose sight of the role of music in the arts. You read biographies of people you admire: Winston Churchill was a painter. You find out that it kind of almost doesn’t matter which– Thomas Jefferson is an excellent keyboard player and collector of manuscripts. George Washington is maybe one of the best, what we call court dancers, or contra dancers in the colonial world, and was lauded for that.

[music]

[00:00:34] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I’m so excited to finally, finally have the opportunity to welcome Dr. Carol Reynolds. She and I have wanted to do this for a year, but boy, you talk about two people who are wildly busy. I think we are in a competition, but I don’t want it to be one. I’m so excited today to talk about transforming your child’s education with the arts. I named it as “Unleash Creativity” because I got to sit in on a session that Dr. Carol presented a year ago in St. Louis, and it was life-changing me in how I thought about how we should talk to our children about the arts. You’re going to learn all the good things that I learned today. Dr. Carol, will you introduce yourself?

[00:01:21] Dr. Carol: Okay. Well, thank you. I am delighted, finally, we found a time. It has been kind of almost a comedy, but then we didn’t give up. I’m delighted to be here with your audience. I’ve admired all that you all do for a long, long time in our journey of being around this entire curriculum and this world of learning, which for me came through witnessing my students. But first, I should say, I’m Carol Reynolds. I’m a music historian. Came up as a pianist from Roanoke, Virginia. Lived a very simple life coming up, and then my dream was to travel and to see and to go, and boy, did that ever happen?

Ended up working and studying in Leningrad, and ended up as a professor at SMU in Dallas in a marvelous school of music, which was where I encountered my first homeschooled students back when I had no idea what that was. At any rate, the whole journey, when you look backwards, as with most things, it all makes sense from my little street in Roanoke, Virginia, but believe me, coming through it was pretty wild.

[00:02:24] Gretchen Roe: Oh, that’s pretty amazing. So, Roanoke, Virginia, to SMU, to all over the world, so–

[00:02:31] Dr. Carol: And a lot of things even before that. Of course, I’ve been really blessed. Again, when I was a kid, the idea of travel, nobody traveled– I’m from a different era. We didn’t even go to the lake. People traveled in books. I knew Paris was out there because of the Madeline books you see, so Paris was probably somewhere over the hills. Then of course, I ended up working for the Smithsonian, which I’ve been doing for the last 15 years, taking groups of adults mostly, who love learning. Again, it’s stunning, and our kids need to know. They don’t know how their dreams will be fulfilled, but it’s very important to have them. Very often, they do get fulfilled, and it’s kind of exciting.

[00:03:15] Gretchen Roe: Absolutely. I was blessed to be an only child of older parents who loved to travel, so I got to go all over the world. Then my husband and I lived overseas for five years and came back penniless because we spent every dollar, pfennig, kroner, everything we had to travel as much as we possibly could, so I think there’s merit in it. Tell us a little bit about how you got from Roanoke to SMU. Tell me about your piano life, because I know that is so relevatory to so many of our families who have students who are plinking away while they’re listening to us.

[00:03:59] Dr. Carol: Okay. Well, again, I came in a different era. Everybody in my generation, you had to take music. I mean, kids just had to do it. It was just an assumed function of being a kid, at least a couple of years, or a few years, whatever. But it turned out I was fairly good, and so it was rather serious. I found Russian literature and Russian music when I was 12. Just first saw the Russian alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and flipped. Because, again, when kids are 9, 10, 11, 12, that’s when they find these things, whatever it’s going to do. You don’t know what it’s going to be. It could be welding, it could be a pastry chef, it could be weaving fabric. For me, it was the Cyrillic alphabet, so my dream was to get to what was then the Soviet Union– Couldn’t do that back then.

I hoped to do it as a pianist, and when it became clear that I was very good and studied very seriously and played a lot of concerts, but not good enough to somehow manage to get into the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, which was about the only way you could get there, I switched to musicology– You know, fancy name for music history. I got my PhD in musicology and got a grant to go– which this was available in the early ’80s, to go to the Soviet Union as a scholar. Very fortunately, I got that and was part of Leningrad Conservatory. Was able to research in that very intense period with Brezhnev, you know, the whole thing.

It was, of course, my first, and this is something for your parents. Even if it’s to the beach, or if it’s to the lake, or if you camp out, if you don’t get some chance to do something challenging as a child, you don’t want the first thing to be a research grant to Leningrad where you really are completely discombobulated. Of course, I had a lot on the line, so it was a wild set of time. It was one of the great divides of my life, but it all worked out. Then I lived in Germany after that. Then I got the position at SMU, Southern Methodist University, which is a hotdog school down in the Southwest with a fabulous school of the arts. Beautiful theaters, good orchestras, wonderful dance program. I mean, I couldn’t have been more fortunate. Although, to be honest, I knew nothing about it before I was hired, before I interviewed and all that.

I had a long career there and taught superb students. Loved it. Great colleagues. I was able to work for the Dallas Opera, Dallas Symphony, Fort Worth Opera, Kimbell Museum, loads of museums. I thought it was the tumbleweed town. I didn’t know it was one of the great arts capitals of the world between Dallas and Fort Worth, with tons of money supporting the arts in that part of the world too, I might say. So, I was very blessed. Then after I retired early, we got a goat ranch, we did that for 10 years. There’s an education– [chuckles] I found out I knew nothing. I thought I knew something, turns out I knew nothing. Got 10 years of that education, which has been very, very wonderful to still cherish. Then we moved a couple of years ago to North Carolina. I’m kind of leaving out the fact of starting all of this work in music for Professor Carol, or Monica, which maybe is your next question.

[00:07:07] Gretchen Roe: Well, it is, but before I ask that question, I want to talk to the little girl who grew up in Roanoke and then found herself in Leningrad. That must have been a wild transition. How did you feel about that? That’s amazing.

[00:07:25] Dr. Carol: Well, there were a lot of steps, and I was in the middle of finishing a PhD. So, I mean, I was not quite– but in some ways–

[00:07:30] Gretchen Roe: Right. You weren’t a child anymore, but still, wow, that’s such a cultural shift.

[00:07:36] Dr. Carol: You know, you think when you’re young, you think you have the tools, and maybe you do. I had studied Russian very seriously, and I had certainly read tons, but it turned out I didn’t know what it is, as you know, from living abroad, or anybody who moves to a very challenging different area or decides to homestead, or whatever you decide to do. I had no idea. I’ll give you my favorite example. I was pretty fluent in Russian, and I’d read a lot of the literature, and studied Old Church Slavonic, but what I hadn’t done is modern handwriting, so I didn’t realize the stores– Of course, back then in the communist period, you would stand in line to be able to pay your Kopecks, or get your little chit and say what you wanted, and then you’d go on another line and pay your Kopecks. These lines could take two, three hours if it were busy and they were anything really worth having, because then it was a long line. Then you’d go to another line [crosstalk]–

[00:08:23] Gretchen Roe: There was no phone to amuse you.

[00:08:25] Dr. Carol: Oh, no kidding. You had your books, so they all read. At any rate, I didn’t realize that most products in those days in these basement stores, which were not your average Kroger– [laughs] I mean, what did I know? Everything was handwritten in this kind of grease pencil that you use on brown paper bagging, and I couldn’t read it. I mean, it was so messy anyway, and I was just an idiot. I would stand there in front of flour, sugar, this, that, macaroni, and I couldn’t even see it, much less read it. And so all of my academic preparation did not prepare me to be able to read the word cornmeal, or it wasn’t cornmeal. Those are the kinds of things that you can only learn by slogging through. And when you come out of these experiences, whatever they are, you decide to sign up and be a swim teacher somewhere in a camp in Canada and you’re not– when you come out of them, whatever they are, you are different.

[00:09:23] Gretchen Roe: Absolutely. Yes. I traveled with my parents overseas to East Germany as a child twice, because that’s where my father’s family was, and I remember being terrified because all I knew was what was conveyed to a five or a seven-year-old. When I got there, it was nothing that I expected. It was much more than I expected. But there’s still that underlying feeling of, “I don’t think I know.” If we can hold onto that, “I don’t think I know, but I want to,” no matter what we do, it becomes a wonderful thing. Tell me how you got to what you’re doing today. I mean, this is pretty impressive that you were a professor of music history, and then you went to a goat farm, and then you moved to North Carolina, and now you’re leading these tours all over the world, so people look to you as though you know what’s going on. Do you still have that feeling of, “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

[00:10:26] Dr. Carol: Yes, this is our new motto. We should get t-shirts, and at least you and I should wear them at the conferences. All right? That could be fun. Well, I think the parents, especially if they’re homeschooling or in co-ops or things– any parent will appreciate this. I had really two outstanding groups of students. These were music majors, and they were always already good students like any arts major tends to be, or you don’t survive, but this is– I’m thinking back particularly about one young woman, but she represented a lot of them. These were either the international students who got excellent educations, whether it’s China, Russia, Poland, wherever it was, Spain, and they came to us in the undergrad, and especially graduate programs, just outstanding players and outstandingly educated, if you can say that.

Then there was this group of kids I couldn’t figure out, because I was already in an era where people weren’t reading novels, they didn’t know their geography. Not quite the way it’s become, but the downward spiral had begun. Suddenly, I had these kids that are writing well, they have beautiful style, they’ve read the novels, they know their history. They’re very patient, they ask good questions. I’m going, “Who are these kids?” Finally, one day I cornered it, and I’m looking over my shoulder because you see, this is a– one of these things, right?

[00:11:42] Gretchen Roe: Oh, yes.

[00:11:42] Dr. Carol: I’ve got to find it. Her name is in here, because when she graduated, she gave it to me. It’s a long story. Anyway, Allison is her name, and if I find it– trust me, it’s in there in one of these [unintelligible 00:11:51]. But Allison, I called her and said, “Allison, this is the second paper you’ve written. It’s so good. Where did you go to high school?” Because she was probably either a freshman or a sophomore. This is about ’93.

She looked down at her feet– It’s ’93, right? And she said quietly, “I was homeschooled,” but looking down.

I said, “What?”

She told me again, and I said the dumbest thing you could ever say, right up there. I said, “Well, you look very healthy. I’m surprised to hear that.” Because in my day, homeschooling meant a child was ill, had been hit by a bus, had a broken leg, some reason, and so they’d send a teacher once a week from the public schools. I mean, that’s very nice, right?

She cracked up laughing. She said, “You don’t know what this is, do you?”

I said, “I have no idea.”

She said, “Do you have time?”

I sat down, she started telling me, and maybe 15 minutes later, with my mouth dropping, I said, “Your mother did this?”

She said, “Well, yes, most of it, but there was also this,” and this is in the early ’90s. She started telling me a bit about what I now know as curriculum, so to speak, and programs, and co-ops.

Then I said, “Is this legal?” Of course, at that time, it wasn’t everywhere legal, or it was very complicated. She started telling me all that, and it was one of the most extraordinary conversations I ever had, so then I began looking for these kids. Little did I know that in 2008, cranking a bit forward from ’93, my husband and I, while on the ranch, would decide after the urging of this collective group of homeschoolers that I had gotten to know in the years in between that time, and began to spot, and had begun to enjoy in special ways– They studied with me in Germany a lot on our German program, it was just great. They always said, there aren’t serious materials in the arts, particularly at the upper elementary, middle school, high school credit, and they kept saying that to me, “You need to do something. You need to do something,” so we decided to do something. That’s how we came to make Discovering Music our signature course.

[00:13:54] Gretchen Roe: That’s amazing.

[00:13:55] Dr. Carol: It is.

[00:13:55] Gretchen Roe: That is just wonderful. As someone who had-

[00:13:57] Dr. Carol: Allison, there it is. It’s all about Allison.

[00:13:58] Gretchen Roe: -who homeschooled her oldest child all the way through, because his kindergarten teacher said, “Anybody who can explain the allegorical references found in Narnia as a kindergartener, doesn’t need to be in a public classroom.” And so I was like, “All right, I’ll commit for a year to homeschooling him,” but then he found the piano, and he got his master’s musician certificate at the age of 17. Loved to play, loved to compete. We tried to talk him in to go to college for piano, and he’s like, “No, why would I do that? That’s where I go to shed the cares of the world, not to carry them.” Now he’s 34, father of two, but he still talks about the joy of his homeschool experience because it gave him the latitude to focus on his first love, which was music.

[00:14:54] Dr. Carol: Oh, yes. That’s so true, and that’s true with dance students and art students in general, or anyone who has a strong passion. You can’t do that if you only have from, say, 4:00 in the afternoon until you keel over after dinner. You can’t pursue things like that. Oh, that’s wonderful.

[00:15:12] Gretchen Roe: I think it’s interesting that Allison gave you that particular thing, because it’s a symbol of you expanding her world. Is it not?

[00:15:22] Dr. Carol: Well, maybe it’s– you know? And you know from teaching, you have these students, tons of them really, and then certain ones, and you still remember their handwriting, you still remember the funny things they wrote. You remember how lucky you are as a teacher, as a parent, even in the difficult moments as a parent, to be participating in this learning adventure, because it’s– So many people don’t get to connect with it. If they don’t, how do they get to see their children learning?

[00:15:52] Gretchen Roe: Okay. Then now, tell me, why do you feel like there’s– and I know the answer, but I’m teeing this up for our audience. Why do you feel like there is value in connecting education and the arts in an age when we’re becoming ever more focused on math, reading, writing?

[00:16:12] Dr. Carol: Well, one can answer that numerous ways. If you want to take a classical approach, and you look at something like the Trivium and the Quadrivium, what’s in the Quadrivium? The four mathematical arts. What is one of those arts? Music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. Those are the four mathematical arts. They go back to ancient times. That is what everybody understood as what made you educated to the point where you could take on your adult life. All right? Of course, they didn’t mean necessarily trumpet lessons in ancient Rome, whatever, but they meant to see math as a scientific and mathematical, and also intellectual force that it is.

If you want to look for a classical, just formulaic fact, only in the last 50, 60 years did we lose sight of the role of music in the arts. You read biographies of people you admire: Winston Churchill was a painter. You find out that it kind of almost doesn’t matter which– Thomas Jefferson is an excellent keyboard player and collector of manuscripts. George Washington is maybe one of the best, what we call court dancers, or contra dancers in the colonial world, and was lauded for that. And we can go on: Franklin, writing music and creating the glass harmonica, which is an instrument, on and on and on. So, these people understood, training and drawing, and training and dance, which was considered part of being– The better dancer you were, the better equestrian you were, the better soldier.

Going back to Washington, he’s said to have sat more gracefully than anyone in the cell. They were maybe flattering him, but everyone understood he was also graceful on the dance floor. If you understand the complexities of social dance, court dance coming out of the French school, but even earlier, and how that translated in the US or any– you understand what is demanded of dance, then you really begin to understand why these skills. You don’t have to get so good, but learning puts it in place. So, I said the classical model. I said something about the developmental skills that it gives you, no matter if you attain a high-high level, or just a medium level, even the smallest level.

Then there’s the whole idea that the arts were the key, they were in the middle of almost any topic or subject you can think of. We don’t see it that way because we haven’t learned it that way, and that’s one of the things you saw, I guess, in the talk you saw in St. Louis. I’m always pulling– you cannot isolate. They are one of the major threads. If you’re weaving, they are either the ones going this way, or the ones going that way, except we have this idea, as you know, that it’s fun for the little kids. We buy them tons of crayons and glitter and little “pu-tu-tu” instruments which you find, and then we come to the age– what is it? Third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, “Okay, put it away. Time to get serious now,” and it becomes your 4:30 in the afternoon on Friday elective. You wouldn’t do that with math, and you wouldn’t do that with physical exercise, or nutrition, or rhetoric, or development of logic. You wouldn’t do that with any of those things. You would never say, “Well, we have to put those aside,” but we do that with the arts.

[00:19:30] Gretchen Roe: Yes, not fair. Definitely not fair, because we become less well rounded, and it narrows our view of the entirety of the world as well.

[00:19:41] Dr. Carol: It does, and we are kind of the culture that does it. Because of the work I do, I’m very blessed to be able to do these, leading these wonderful, crazy, wild, amazing people around, and just kind of along for the ride, and of course, lecturing and stuff like that. You go other places, let’s say you go to Estonia, you go to Croatia, you go to Spain, you go to any place in the Slavic area, Poland, Hungary, places that I go, Russia, and people still sing in choirs. They still learn their folk dances. Poland, that’s one of my favorite examples. From three up, they learn the Polonaise and do the Mazurka, and all these, because these are the roots of their culture. They’re not terrified to sing, and they are– If they aren’t able to get classical instruction, they learn folk instruments, or they take the kids to museums regularly so that they are at least moderately educated in their cultural heritage or the visual arts. We are the ones that have lost that and made it elite. We’ve made it elite, and only those who live in New York or San Francisco or Boston, those people have it. The rest of the country has to work much, much harder to find it.

[00:20:50] Gretchen Roe: Sure. Absolutely. Tell me what it’s like to be traveling with Dr. Carol. I’m planning the future in advance here, so– [chuckles]

[00:21:01] Dr. Carol: Oh, okay. Well, I don’t have the– If we did it exactly the way I want to do it, I’d wear everybody out by day three, but– You know, you do follow preset agendas, and I’m doing some wonderful things this year and next year that are coming up: a Wagner ring cycle that’s already sold out, so I can say that, I guess, even though it hasn’t barely been announced. Mostly what you end up doing is, sometimes on the riverboats, sometimes on sea, sometimes on land, what you’re trying to do very often, especially with older people, is reconnect them either to a dream they had, or very often, their heritage.

I mean, this is not the only occasion, but this is one that sticks to my mind when we were in Hungary. We stopped the bus, little road, not too little, but sort of little, because we weren’t going to be able to go, let’s say, 80 kilometers down the road to this village, but this was the sign, and the bus driver said he knew where the turn was. And this was where the man’s parents had come from, or grandparents had come from. We stopped the bus and got out and took his picture, so there’s a lot of reconnecting with roots. There’s a lot of people who’ve just always dreamed of having something like this happen. Now, when you take young people, it’s a whole different thing. There, you’ve got to really work well, I don’t want to say control, but organize their energies, because nobody is tireder than young people.

I’m telling you, people when they’re 70 and 80, and even 90, they got energy. They may have physical challenges, but they’ve got energy. Young people are by nature laconic mostly, you know? They wear down, they wear out. It’s almost like little kids. That’s not to discourage any of your viewers from letting– If there’s an opportunity to send your children on study tours and travel with relatives, do it. But you sort of have to pump them up with a lot of great European pastries, and if you’re an adult, cappuccino or whatever. I mean, you have to prepare them, and then you have to know that what’s going in is much greater than they can tell you. They might even seem as if they’re not getting anything, but they do. They’re just cool, so it’s a very different experience with young people. Very different.

[00:23:11] Gretchen Roe: I bet. My youngest decided last year that he wanted to go to the Amalfi Coast of Italy. He planned his own trip at the age of 18 and spent two weeks on the Amalfi Coast with his best friend from high school. This was his best friend’s graduation present. Every day, they called and said what they were doing and what they had found, and I told him– I said, “I know you want to really see the big tourist things that are there to be had, we talked a lot about those things, but the wisdom you’re going to gain is sitting in a little cafe and talking to someone who is from there.”

He came back with reams of stories of the conversations he’d had and the people he met. I said to him, “So, what was your favorite part of your trip?”

He said, “Riding around for two days on a scooter and waving to people, and then people would wave back. And so we’d stop and say, do you speak any English?” He said, “We used Google Translate a lot,” but he said, “We had a blast because we learned all about where we were.” There’s something very special about that.

[00:24:25] Dr. Carol: And two things– We sometimes come back home to learn about where we are after we’ve seen somewhere else, anywhere else. Then we begin to, for the first time, see our own flowers, our own trees, our own feel, smell our own air, so to speak. Then the other thing too, I think that we see in some parts of the world, as I say, this integration of the culture isn’t split the same way, that we feel almost a tension of definitely the country and city and this and that. I mean, that’s a historical theme in Western culture, but we tend to not even begin to want to appreciate all sides of this.

I was thinking earlier when I was wondering what you might ask about art, because this morning, I was showing my grandchildren the internet. It is the devil in our midst, and it also brings us incredible blessings. We were watching this wonderful historian in a Cumberland something museum in Tennessee, dressed in colonial clothing, showing them the mouth harp and the tin whistle. I was remembering how when I grew up, I didn’t know, I just assumed– Kids assume all sorts of stuff. I thought there was an opposition between what my daddy did out on the back porch and on the picnic table playing Jimmy Rogers and old country music, and my mother, who was from New York, listening to the Met on the radio while she ironed, and singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, and here I’m playing Beethoven and Brahms in the middle. I had trouble thinking they all– somehow, you could only have one that was right.

That’s something I would want to say to your viewers. You might not be able to get tickets to the Boston Symphony. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t take little kids to the Boston Symphony, unless they’re raised in a highly musical family and they’re totally ready for that, because you’re going to spend a fortune, and they’re going to be asleep in a few minutes, because you’re not going to get in the second row. And even if you did, they still might be asleep. But you go to a high school orchestra, a fifth grader thinks the middle school band sounds great. You and I might know that it doesn’t, but they don’t know that.

[00:26:21] Gretchen Roe: [chuckles] Right.

[00:26:22] Dr. Carol: Look, high school bands these days are as good as professional orchestras used to be in previous eras. I mean, the level in your public high school music programs, if you’re around that kind of a place– I’m thinking of Dallas and Fort Worth, but many places, it’s unbelievable the repertoire they play and how well are these conferences and competitions. So, the idea is, you don’t have to do the top thing. A community school orchestra or art shows, you always want to curate a little bit, get on the phone, and say, “Hey, is this appropriate for three, four, five, nine-year-olds?” That’s important, because the college environment is what it is, but there’s a lot of things that are–

But I think, thinking again, what if you could get your kids– if they say, “Oh, ballet is stupid.” I mean, I understand why. I never got to see it until I was in my 20s, and it’s just sissy. I brought this just in case the topic came up. You know, it’s sissy, right? Now, these are old point shoes. I don’t know if you can see these. I mean, these have been worn already-

[00:27:20] Gretchen Roe: Um-hum. Yes.

[00:27:22] Dr. Carol: -and they’re rehearsal shoes. Not mine, by the way. I didn’t get these, but you see, after a lot of work, your point shoes are going to look something like this, and let’s say– I remember the first time I found out– there’s going to be a big noise– that point shoes, when you realize what dancers, whether they’re male and not on point or female on point, what their bodies do, they are the most extraordinarily tortured athletes probably out there. I mean, it’s unbelievable. So I’m thinking, okay, so you say– if you can take your kids to see, you’d have to ask permission, but watch two hours of, let’s say even just a sophomore junior/senior level bar, what they call, the several hours a day that they spend doing the most intricate movements over and over, even the most professional dancers. Or you can see this online, you can get the Royal Ballet Theater, you can watch them do, and you say, “Well, wait a minute. These people can jump and leap. Why do they spend four hours a day sometimes every day, at least two, to be able to–”

[00:28:21] Gretchen Roe: Because they won’t be able to jump and leap unless they have all that practice. Yes.

[00:28:23] Dr. Carol: To be able to. When you see this, you begin to say, “Wait a minute, I may not decide this is my favorite art form, or I may, but I realize now that people who are trained like this can go off and do this and that type of dance, and this type of a Broadway dance, and that this is exhausting and an unbelievably crafted art.” So, you can’t get a superficial understanding. And that’s true of casting bronze, that’s true of stained glass making, that’s true of violin making. If you can get your kids where they can see something, even the simplest form of it, the preconceptions and the misinformation will fall away.

[00:29:01] Gretchen Roe: Absolutely. Last week we had the privilege when we got set up for the conference, then we were looking for something to do in Columbus, and we actually went to the Columbus Arboretum. They had glass workers, lamp workers working a kiln. My father was a glassblower, so I sat down and was thrilled to pieces to sit there and see that. That broadens a child’s world in a wonderful and unusual way that they never forget.

[00:29:29] Dr. Carol: No, no, no. If you’re just talking about being culturally literate, that’s another thing about the arts. People think we want them to keep working with crayons and glitter. I actually like glitter a lot because we didn’t have it, so I want to go back and do my childhood again and have just bottles of glitter, which my mother would’ve never let me do anyway, despite that Electrolux vacuum that I still have, but nonetheless– That’s a bit off the rabbit track, isn’t it? But the fact is, glitter has its time. The crafts are very important, but the person who can do crafts ends up weaving tapestries, and person who likes to play with clay might become an artistic candlemaker or whatever. There is that part of it, but we’re forgetting the intellectual and the spiritual and the emotional, not to mention, as I say, the spiritual dimensions of the arts. And so we have to, I think– You wouldn’t take all that and shift it to the side as an elective if you get to it. You wouldn’t. Except, of course, and you’re probably going to say this next, how do parents learn to do all this? How do they get on board with that?

[00:30:29] Gretchen Roe: Oh, you read my mind. That’s what [crosstalk]–

[00:30:31] Dr. Carol: I did.

[00:30:31] Gretchen Roe: While I’m parenting, I found what you’ve said compelling. How do I make this happen?

[00:30:37] Dr. Carol: Yes. I didn’t mean to jump there, but I was just– [chuckles] Because that’s what I hear too, people come up– You know, I love working with classical– I’m in a group called The Classical Consortium. We renamed ourselves about 10 years ago with Martin Cothran, Andrew Pudewa, Chris Perrin, Andrew Kern, and several of our colleagues, like Jay Wile and others that we love very, very much, Janice Campbell. We’ve all kind of hung out together and done all these panels and things. The thing about it is that we hear these questions on these panels where people feel, “How do I do this? How do I do this?”

One of the things you do is, you learn along with your children. I love when I listen to, say, Martin Cothran talking about it. Of course, you don’t know Latin. When you were up, it wasn’t even offered in the schools. So, you’re going to learn Latin with your kids. If you want to study the night before so you’re a little less clueless, or you can be honest with them and say, “I never got Latin. In fact, I had really terrible Spanish, or terrible French, but we are going to start you in third, or fourth, or fifth grade, with these beautiful curricular out there. You know, you have to be– I mean, even if you’re lying down and half asleep, you’ll learn it, in the beginning stages especially. It’s so beautifully crafted, nothing like what I– I had a lot of Latin, but it wasn’t crafted like that. Learning with your children is okay. It’s absolutely okay. They will go beyond you very quickly.

[00:31:56] Gretchen Roe: You know, I’m so often taken aback, because I say that to parents all the time, “Well, you’re just going to learn right alongside your child.” Parents seem to be of the notion that if you’re an adult, you should have done all the learning. The older I get, the more I realize there’s more to learn, so how do you instill that in an adult who thinks that they’ve already arrived?

[00:32:23] Dr. Carol: Again, thinking just in terms of homeschooling, it’s the greatest adult education program that’s ever been devised. You have to remind them– Most adults, if you calm them down, they are interested. Why something like The Great Courses were such a success? You see them all in the library. As adults, we still want to learn. We’re not sure always what we want to learn, and we can get overwhelmed. It’s a misplaced understanding of what an adult is. Misplaced, not egotism, it’s just that fear. It’s fear. It’s fear too, because what if I don’t understand it? What if I can’t do it? Oh, that’s right, the kid’s going to do it. Or, what if I’m not good at this? What if I can’t get the point across? Well, then maybe you’ll find someone else.

This is again why we got into it, was to create courses and programs and webinars that would bring– I don’t want say bring it down, but that would put longer– If you think about it seemingly up here, then you put longer ropes for people to climb, if you will, or swings to swing them up to. We want the courses and everything we’ve done– and this is what you would do if you’re thinking about professional training in the arts. You make your entry level courses, your freshman courses, giving it a limited picture so that you get those strengths, and then you move up, and then you move up, and then you move up. But you’re right, parents are really afraid, and they want their kids to have confidence in them.

And there are some things you probably don’t want to do. You might not want to be your talented basketball-playing son’s or daughter’s only coach. You would go find someone who would probably be a better coach, right? So there are some things, when you see great ability, you probably do step out and find someone else to help. I’m answering all around that, but the fear is what we all have. I have that. When people come to dinner, I’m scared. I’m a moderately okay cook, not very good. I manage. I go into panic when people visit, even though I have some tried-and-true recipes, because I want to be able to do it more and better and beautiful. There are people that can, but that would not be me. Fear is many, many factors in our daily lives.

[00:34:30] Gretchen Roe: What would you like to leave our audience with? What’s the thing you want them to ponder on as they go throughout the rest of their day?

[00:34:38] Dr. Carol: Sing to your children. When they’re in your body, sing to your children. Sing to them all the time. We’ll have another talk sometime about the fact that you can sing even if you think you can’t. Nothing is sweeter than the voice of a mother. The child will remember that forever. Maybe when they’re 14, they won’t like it, but singing to your children. Just as we’re clear about why we read to them, sing, because that’s our first music from God. That’s what we– It’s in the Scriptures: “Sing. Sing unto the Lord. Sing.”

It’s our breath. We breathe in, we sing out. That’s what we do, and so you cannot– sing, clap, dance, realize that a six-month old hears a Sousa March and is already doing sophisticated, rhythmic gestures. That’s not flailing, that’s dancing. Realize that from the very beginning when you’re putting music and beautiful things that they grasp for, you are absolutely feeding their already completely God-given abilities to be creative, to be facile in ways that nothing else can fulfill.

[00:35:47] Gretchen Roe: I love it. I love just that message. I think it’s important. Thank you for saying that, because it affirms for me all the crazy songs and the things I taught my children, all the Broadway tunes that we sang together, all the hymns that we sang together were worth every minute. Thank you so much for this time. I can’t believe it’s come to an end, but boy, I think all of you who have joined us today can see how fabulous Professor Carol is. I will put her website in the show notes. I hope you find worth in what she has to say. My bucket list is to get to travel with you somewhere someday, because I think it’s going to be amazing.

[00:36:34] Dr. Carol: We would have too much fun. [laughs]

[00:36:37] Gretchen Roe: Well, I think you are one of those ladies, as my husband describes me, who can thread a sewing machine as it runs, so I think we would have a lot of fun together.

[laughter]

[00:36:49] Dr. Carol: Wow.

[00:36:50] Gretchen Roe: Thank you so much for this time. I appreciate you tremendously. I will look forward to seeing you again soon, and I wish you safe journeys on this travel that you have upcoming. It’s going to be very exciting.

[00:37:03] Dr. Carol: Thank you.

[00:37:04] Gretchen Roe: Take care, everyone. Join us again soon. Thank you for trusting us to come into your living room. It’s been my very great pleasure to host Professor Carol Reynolds today, and I hope you’ll join us again soon. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

[music]

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